I like the command line, I’ll admit it, it’s old-school but l am old-school. Clicking around a graphical interface is all well and good but if you want to get something done the command line is the way to do it. My high school years, college years and early career were a variety of Unix flavors, VMS, DOS, CP/M with an assortment of editors, programming languages and shells.

What I love is when a graphical interface can be managed via a command line. This way I know that I can use all my favorite tools (old and new) to get done what needs to be done. What needs to get done sometimes is taking the point and click out of a task. That’s my focus today.

Here’s the scenario, download SNMP MIBs for UCS. Go to that web page and you need to get very clicky, perhaps even right-clicky and select the “save as” option. More clicks, with potentially over 100 MIBs to download that’s 200 plus clicks, and the repetition is as mind numbing as a top 40 radio station.

This is the story of Russ, a Networking Consulting Engineer on the Cisco Advanced Services (AS) team, who took time aside from his regular day job to lay the seeds of an exceptional resource on the IWE QUAD Community, an internal social platform. As a result of his efforts, the AS team’s work efficacy has increased and Cisco’s rapport with customers and partners has improved immensely.

Southern California Edison (SCE) is one of the Advanced Services (AS) team’s largest clients with over 10-15 service activities usually going on at one time. The advent of bringing people in and out of working with this client proved to be a recurring issue because these individuals had little to no knowledge about SCE, and there was no official training route they could go through in order to be brought up to speed about the client’s needs.

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FIPS-140 is a US and Canadian government standard that specifies security requirements for cryptographic modules. A cryptographic module is defined as “the set of hardware, software, and/or firmware that implements approved security functions (including cryptographic algorithms and key generation) and is contained within the cryptographic boundary.” The cryptographic module is what is being validated.

Actually, I did it on Saturday afternoon, that way I had time to test the patch and roll it back if necessary and still have the car ready for Monday.

So… when do you patch your car? Interesting, albeit fictitious, conversation that will relatively soon become reality. New cars are sophisticated artifacts. They look nice and enable you to travel from point A to point B in great comfort (well, most of them), and they are packed with electronics. Inside the car there are multiple processors and computers executing hundreds of thousands of lines of code to ensure your safe journey. The programmers who wrote that code are as equally adept as the ones writing modern operating systems and applications – which means that there are some errors in the algorithms that monitor and maintain many aspects of your car, and in their implementation.

Something exciting is happening in the city by the lake. The Mayor, Government Officials, enterprises, developers and residents are banding together to propel Chicago to the forefront of the global economy – to reclaim its position as a beacon for talent, the choice for commerce, and the premiere city where people go to work, live, learn and play. Last week, I took part in a series of activities to usher in a new era of prosperity for this great city as Mayor Rahm Emanuel rolled out his Master Plan for economic growth. Education, job creation, revitalization and technology – are at the heart of this transformational plan.

Preparing the next-generation of technology innovators is critical to an economy that relies increasingly on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). I joined Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a press conference to unveil a new STEM program with a very unique approach. In five schools around the city, students will acquire critical ICT skills seamlessly in a learning environment that integrates high school, college and the workplace. The curriculum is developed jointly by the schools, principals, teachers and corporate sponsor companies, of which Cisco is one. Bottom line: the students learn relevant, real-world skills in high school, emerge with an Associate’s Degree, and have first choice at interviewing for jobs with companies around the city – all without incurring a student loan debt. This is truly out of the box thinking. But this is just the first step. At Cisco, we are also looking at the delivery model and how technology can improve the experience – make learning fun again. Can we do this virtually? Is there a collaborative way of doing this? Can we learn from schools around the world? What if you made a correlation between the student’s favorite sport – using technology to measure the body’s algorithms and then used that to teach the math courses? We’ve already introduced a STEM program in the United Kingdom that applies this approach to learning, and it’s working!

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